Having badly misjudged the strength of inflation over the past year, central bankers are now anxious to convey the message that they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1970s. So much the better, you might think, because that era told us that the long-term costs of allowing inflation to become entrenched far outweigh the short-term ones of bringing it under control.Yet while the current threat of stagflation rhymes with the 1970s, the wider economic and financial context when Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker started tightening policy in 1979 differed notably from today. Inflation was much higher and the advanced economies looked very different. It is important, then, to ponder the likely new mistakes of the 2020s.
The single most important difference, in terms of steering a course back to stable prices, relates to the huge accumulation of debt since that time. In the US, gross public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rose from 34.3 per cent in 1982 to 127.0 per cent in 2021. A similar trend was apparent across the developed world. Debt levels in the corporate and household sectors were also on a rising trend during that period. But why?
One fundamental cause was the supply-side shock whereby China, India and the eastern Europeans joined the world economy, cheapening labour relative to capital. This resulted in less investment and weaker demand in the advanced economies. Central banks compensated for this with looser monetary policy that distorted asset prices upwards relative to goods prices while securing debt dependent growth. Meantime, inflation remained quiescent, making it easy for central banks to keep within inflation targets introduced in the post-Volcker era.